History

Civil Rights Movements and The U.S. Supreme Court
Grades: 10-12
This course examines the evolving role of the U.S. Supreme Court in shaping civil rights throughout American history. Through close reading of the US Constitution and landmark Supreme Court decisions, students will explore how the Court has both advanced and restricted the rights of individuals and marginalized communities. By engaging with primary source documents — court opinions themselves — students will develop their ability to interpret legal texts, evaluate constitutional arguments, and consider the broader social and historical contexts in which these decisions were made. The course invites critical discussion on the balance between justice and precedent, and challenges students to consider the dynamic relationship between the judiciary and movements for social change. The final project will consist of writing a well-researched amicus brief for one of the cases studied during the course.

Foundational Social Movements in the Americas: 1950s to 1970s
Grades: 10-12
Between 1950 and the late 1970s, waves of popular struggles transformed the Americas. Across the hemisphere, everyday people organized, marched, occupied, and went on strike, demanding legal reforms, human rights, gender equity, land rights, environmental justice, political power, and much more. This course explores the crucial social movements of this tumultuous era, examining their origins, ideologies, strategies, internal tensions, and lasting legacies. Students will consider how movements across national borders borrowed tactics, exchanged ideas, and understood their struggles as interconnected. In their work, students will analyze primary sources (manifestos, speeches, government documents, oral histories, testimonies, and literary and visual works) alongside critical interpretations by historians and political thinkers to map local freedom dreams and hemispheric struggles. The class will engage in collaborative analysis, comparative thinking, discussion, creative research, and analytical writing.

Modern Russia: Revolution to the Present
Grades 10-12
How does a country’s past shape the wars it starts and the leaders it produces? This seminar traces the arc of Russian history from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 through the collapse of the Soviet Union and into the Putin era, ending in an examination of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Using primary sources, film, and contemporary scholarship, students will explore questions of power, memory, and empire. Potential topics include: Stalinism and the Soviet system, the Cold War, the chaos of the 1990s, the consolidation of authoritarian power, Russian national identity, and the war in Ukraine.

Music and Migration: History and Literature of American Roots Music
Grades: 10-12 • This course can be taken for either History or English credit.
There are more differences between us than we can readily understand; there are also more similarities and connections, both historically and in our art. In this course, students will explore departures and continuities across three routes of traditional American migration. Seeking an understanding of the blues, jazz, bluegrass, and country music, they’ll ‘travel’ from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, from Appalachia to the Mid-Atlantic megalopolis, and from Oklahoma to Bakersfield, California. Course texts may include Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues, Michael Ondaadtje’s Coming through Slaughter, and John Steinbeck’s’ Grapes of Wrath, as well as contemporary documents including the many songs that students will hear together.

South African History
Grades 10-12
This course will examine the complex and often contentious modern history of South Africa, from first colonial contact with Europeans, through 20th century Apartheid, to the present day. Throughout the semester, students will wrestle with the lasting impacts of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. They will take a close look at these themes from the perspective of both the colonizer and the colonized as well as investigate the lasting legacies of Apartheid in current South African culture.

Turning Points in the History of the Modern Middle East
Grades: 10-12
This course will examine the transformations that have taken place in Southwest Asia from the rule of the Ottoman Empire to the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The class will not attempt to tell the whole story end to end, but it will concentrate on those moments or case studies that best explain how we got where we are in the Middle East today. Themes will likely include an introduction to Middle Eastern art and culture, experiences of and reactions to colonialism, experiments in government, successful and unsuccessful revolutions, conflicting ideas of justice, modernization and its many definitions, nation-states and their alternatives, and the changing and overlapping identities which have united and divided groups in the region. 

Comparative World Governments
Grades: 10-12
This course introduces students to the structures, functions, and guiding principles of governments around the world. By examining a range of political systems — parliamentary, one-party, multiparty, authoritarian, and hybrids — students will gain a deeper understanding of how power is organized, exercised, and limited in different national contexts. Readings will include excerpts from national constitutions, important political texts, and current events. Through case studies and class discussions, students will develop a global lens for evaluating governance and its impact on society. The final project will be to independently create a case study for a world government based on the models used in class.

Race and Racism in Global Context
Grades: 10-12
What is race? What is racism? How and where did the concept of race emerge? How have understandings of what race means changed over time and space? How do the forms and expressions of racism affect people’s lived experiences? After investigating the driving forces, machinery, and consequences of racism in different parts of the modern world, students will study and ultimately advocate for various paths to liberation. Specific topics include the misuse of science (from craniometry to DNA ancestry testing) in racial classification; affirmative action in India and Brazil; efforts to secure reparations for the translatlantic slave trade in the Caribbean and the Indian residential school system in Canada; the colonial legacy of colorism in beauty standards in Asia; and contests over memorialization, from Richmond’s Monument Avenue to #RhodesMustFall in South Africa.

Rise of American Conservatism: From Truman to Trump
Grades 10-12
What is “Conservatism”? Is it a political ideology that promotes small government and individual responsibility? Do conservatives advocate defense of tradition? Do they believe that the government should play no role in the private lives of individuals? Do they believe in essential human dignity? Mankind’s spiritual nature? The answers to all of these questions are, well, complex and confusing. Beginning with the end of the Second World War, this course will explore the development of conservative ideology and politics in the United States. Students will read some of the seminal literature on conservatism, such as Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, and Garry Wills’ The Convenient State. The objective of the course is not to promote a specific political stance, but to approach the terms “liberal” and “conservative” with a more layered and multi-dimensional understanding than is too often the case.

United States Government and Civic Life
Grades: 10-12
How does American democracy actually work? This course examines the structures, institutions, and ideas that shape political life in the United States, from the Constitution to contemporary policy debates. Students will use current events as a lens to evaluate American democracy, its foundational documents and legal texts. Potential topics include: constitutional foundations, the three branches of government, federalism, civil liberties and civil rights, political participation, and the relationship between citizens and the state.

World War One: Causes and Consequences
Grades 10-12
It was “The war to end all wars.” In July 1914, people across Europe and the world were promised that the war would be “over by Christmas.” Over four years later, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, that same conflict came to an end as ‘The Great War.’ In this course, students will come to understand how “some foolish thing in the Balkans” became the costliest and deadliest conflict in human history in its time. The course will begin with a survey of 19th-century European History before diving into the social, economic, and political aspects that contributed to the war’s outbreak and made possible its execution over four devastating years. Students will engage with primary source written accounts, literature, film, and oral history to build a clearer picture of a much discussed but often misunderstood conflict in World History.